The best exercise for lower back pain #2

Whether you are sedentary for most of the day or a highly active person it is possible to develop back pain. If your pain isn’t the result of a specific injury but is the kind of pain your doctor may term “non-specific” then you need corrective exercise.

A corrective exercise is one that helps to re-balance the body and reduce compensatory movements. If you have asymmetrical muscular weakness/tightness you address it with corrective exercise.

These are the kinds of exercises you should be including in either your warm ups or your finishers and core work at the end of a gym session, if not both. One such exercise is the loaded carry. Loaded carries come in various forms and I’m going to show you a few variations here.

Farmer Walks

First off you have the basic carry, known as a farmer’s walk because it looks like you’re carrying a couple of pales of milk.

It’s important to get your form right, so you should hinge the hips and keep the spine in neutral position, this means no flexing or rounding of the back. Grab the weights, but don’t lift them just yet.

Once in that position, slightly shift your weight back towards your heels and (if necessary) shift your hips back and up slightly until you feel tension in your hamstrings. Squeeze your arm pits, lift your chest until you are almost arching your mid-spine and keep everything nice and tight.

You’re not pulling the weight up with your arms, you’re stabilising the spine with your core muscles and then think about driving your feet through the floor to extend the hips. This way you lift with your hips and not your back. It’s basically a deadlift.

Pick a distance, if your gym has a track in it you can walk from one end to the next, set the weights down and then turn around, lift and walk back. Do this several times. If you can’t do it in a straight line just walk in a circle around the room. Many gyms have a carpeted track for just such exercises, this is usually the area where they have battle ropes and, if it’s that sort of gym, prowler sleds. An ideal length is at least 15m, but you could just aim for 20-odd paces or walk for 20-30 seconds continually.

Suitcase Carries

I like to use a variation called the suitcase carry. This is where you carry a weight in one hand only. The reason for this is to create “anti-rotation” – if you read this blogthen you understand why anti-rotation is important, especially if you suffer with back pain – This is where the lateral muscles of the core have to engage to prevent unnecessary movement of the spine.

It’s great for stabilising the lower back. It’s one of the exercises in my Back-Pain Solution. The same rules apply here, as with the Farmer Walk, with the obvious exception being that uni-lateral ‘unweighted’ weighted element. Picking the kettlebell up is like a suitcase deadlift.

The Cook Carry

Now, if these aren’t challenging enough for you and you are a recreational athlete aspiring to Herculean levels of strength and fitness then there’s the Cook Carry. Created by famed physiotherapist Gray Cook. He claims that if more people did loaded carries there would be less need for corrective exercises

A bold claim but he’s worked with thousands of athletes so who am I to question? Here’s a clip of him explaining his principles of stability:

The Cook Carry is a waiter’s carry, where you hold the kettlebell overhead, set a timer for 12-minutes or so and walk around as long as you can until your form breaks and you are no longer able to hold the weight overhead with stability. Then, bring the kettlebell down to rack position, continue until your form starts to go and then bring the kettlebell down into a suitcase carry.

Do that on both sides and it’s a workout in itself.

I used to say that if you only do one strength exercise you should do heavy deadlifts. I still love deadlifts but I now believe that loaded carries are the one. If everyone did these, and I do mean EVERYONE (even your mum) many health problems, especially those associated with age related physical decline would drop massively.

I mean, just look at it! What exercise has more of a functional carry-over to daily living than one that trains you to be better at carrying bags of shopping, luggage or drinks trays?

Couple these with a healthy diet and a good night’s sleep, and you may just evade the onset of sarcopenia, osteoporosis, chronic back pain, adult-onset diabetes and other chronic conditions.

– Coach Troy

Learn to remove your back pain; check out my online program the Back-Pain Solution